South Africa was the country that showed the most interest in the world for bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency, measured by the number of people who searched for information in Google in 2017.

A survey conducted by the financial services giant Old Mutual found that 38% of residents and citizens of the second largest economy in Africa would like to put their money in cryptocurrencies. South Africans also expressed a positive sentiment regarding cryptoactives in general, with 71% of them saying “you can earn a lot of money”. However, 43% of the population that compared digital assets with pyramid schemes, showing there is much more positive promotiona work to do.

As for cryptocurrency awareness, 60% of South Africans said they did not know of its existence, while the percentage of those who demonstrated a high level of knowledge was 4%. Those with low knowledge of cryptocurrencies stood at 17%, while 19% learned about them recently.

Perhaps because of the popularity of cryptocurrencies in the country and the greater adoption in relation to other African countries, the South African Revenue Service demanded at the end of April that taxpayers declare the profits or losses that they have obtained from the cryptocurrencies as part of taxable income. At that time, SARS indicated that cryptocurrencies were intangible assets, not currencies. In the case of cryptocurrency miners, the tax agency ordered mined coins to be treated as ‘commercial shares’ until they were exchanged or sold for cash.

The deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of South Africa, Francois Groepe, seemed to agree with SARS in May, as he claimed that the central bank did not consider the cryptoactive as coins because they allegedly did not meet the requirements of money. Instead, Groepe clarified, the SARB would refer to them as cyber-tokens, or cybernetic tokens.